I Watched the Democratic Collapse in Florida. I Fear It's Happening Nationally.

[In It to Win It]

The Bulwark

IT IS TIME TO STOP talking about 2024.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of opinions about the campaign and the years leading up to it. But that isn’t the conversation Democrats need to be having. The real conversation is how my party went from the broadest electoral mandate of the previous twenty-five years, with the biggest majority in the Senate in the previous thirty years, to a shell of itself—a political organization that can hardly be classified as a national entity anymore.

There are a lot of metrics we can cite for this, but this may be the most telling: Of Barack Obama’s 332 electoral votes in 2012, 53 of them came from states that aren’t really in play anymore: Florida, Ohio, and Iowa.

All three states have gone Republican three elections in a row. Prior to 2012, Iowa had gone Democratic in five of the previous six presidential elections, Ohio had gone to Democrats in four of six, and Florida in three of six (though it probably was four out of six had my state known how to count ballots).

That’s not just a canary in a coalmine. It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home.

Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is.